Game Changer: Bitcoin research at the Federal Reserve and how I've lost my job

UPDATE: I'm traveling and hence haven't answered any more questions. I've gotten many more inquiries and as I said in one of the posts am currently vetting various outlets. I decided against giving proof to a community member and will instead opt for disclosure with a reliable business/economics news source. Stay tuned.

The Background: I'm a trained economist with a B.S. in Computer Science, a M.S. in Operations Research, and a PhD in Econometrics. I interned at the NY Fed during my degree, worked at a macro trading hedge fund, and now work at the major S.E. Fed branch doing econometrics and related modeling. I've had a long running interest in bitcoin and was one of the first people to publish a working paper on FPGA based bitcoin miners at a Georgia university focused on technology. I know bitcoin, technology, and economics on a theoretical and applied level. I'm not motivated by money (see my move from hedge fund to fed); I'm an applied academic with an incessant drive for research.

The Job: I function as a briefing researcher at the Federal Reserve. My primary research interests are the statistical modeling of developing currencies and the integration of those models into our massively parallel simulations for policy projections and forecasts. In layman's terms, I do the lower level mathematical/statistical research and then brief senior management (fed governors) at our regular meetings.

At the beginning of May, my team and I were assigned to an exploratory project. Typically summer is the off-season and most of the projects are time fillers that result in a few papers/presentations and are then archived and never heard of again. This project was different. We were given a direct research assignment from the Board of Governors a few hours after the conclusion of their May 29th closed meeting.

The Assignment: We and as far as I know several other research teams across the Fed system were tasked with creating a bitcoin report. I assigned my team to run the typical econometrics simulations and forecasts we do for developing currencies. Thinking this was summer doldrum busy work, we were diligent on calculations and modeling but definitely did not go out of our way to provide extra insight. At the end of June, I presented the report to my Fed governor and was met with strong disapproval and a sense of upmost urgency. Long story short, I almost lost my job for not taking this project as seriously as I should have and the Board of Governors renewed the projct and gave us explicit research directions along with weekly addendums.

The Dirty: We were directed to upgrade our modeling of bitcoin from developing currency to a major currency. In addition to all of the common modeling and forecasting that task entails, we were instructed to do full simulations of money flows, interest rates, multi currency derivative baskets, risk metrics, and their effects on global macro monetary policy and trade agreements. What we found was shocking. Even with a mediocre adoption rate and variable growth rate, bitcoin severly disrupts how we model, forecast, and ultimately understand currency interactions to make monetary policy decisions. This is a huge technological, monetary, and policy disruption which leaves the Fed, the US govt, and other entities with much less control. Our best case scenarios are modeled upon current bitcoin adoption rates which have simulated a tipping point for the year 2026 (worst case 2021); this time frame projects the Fed (via the dollar) to lose its dominant global monetary policy maker status - instead everything will superceded by bitcoin.

I presented this updated report along with all of our modeling work and simulation outputs which were statistically and independently verified to the Board of Governors. The Board was highly alarmed and interrogated me and my fellow researchers in a 3 day session trying to understand every point of our research. It must be remembered that unlike politicians, the Board of Governors is a very well educated and empirical group with an ability to conceptually grasp complicated research.

The Outcome: Three weeks after the report, my research team was disbanded, I was moved to a tiny regional federal reserve branch and given virtually no research resources. Similar fates came to my team members and most of us are actively trying to pursue opportunities outside of the system. While the classified information nondisclosure agreements bind us in many ways, I personally will try to go back into the trading industry with a keen eye on bitcoin as my primary research interest.

It is clear to me that Bitcoin has fundamentally changed the spectrum of how we view and model economics. The central banks are afraid, the governments are afraid, and they would rather bury the truth by firing their own dedicated researchers and archiving the reports than embrace change and building a sustainable economic future.

If you have any questions feel free to AMA, I will try my best to answer.

I assumed that just meant the researchers were directed to increase the scope of analysis to the kinds of metrics that are looked at when they analyze major currencies. Basically just a more in-depth analysis covering more aspects.

Edit: Alternatively, it could be interpreted as, "We were directed to project what happens if Bitcoin becomes one of the major global currencies. We found it would eat everything else."

Pardon my skepticism, I want to believe you, but you almost must know that you are making extraordinary claims. Are you willing to in some way verify yourself or your claims? If not publicly, maybe to someone well known in the community?

Yes. I have already gotten several private messages from well known community members. While maintaining pseudo anonymity I will vest and prove my credentials/pseudo identity to verify where I have worked and what my function was. Stay tuned.

And, "upmost urgency" too? I have never, ever heard anyone use the preposition "upmost" in place of the word "utmost" when describing the highest degree possible or greatest extent or intensity of the noun, "urgency."

Someone with his level of education and as voluminously well read as one must be to hold such degrees and positions would never make such an error or typo. In terms of OP's authenticity, this use "upmost" is a text-generation homophonic brain turd, and a huge red flag for me. That, along with the all-too-specific description of OP's origin.

If OP had ANY fear of retribution from his naughty bitcoin report, LET ALONE fear of retribution for posting the above (!!!), OP's post would have been much, much less specific on those background details, which are - in truth - wholly unnecessary for a pseudo-anon story except that it serves as an attempt to lend (highly risky) credibility to a random reddit post. Stinks like a fake to me. Good try, though.

EDIT: If not fake, I do wish you will take more sincerely careful precautions in all your subsequent actions, OP. It would not be hard to narrow down who you are to a small handful of possibilities, if the info you've given above is true. I wish you luck and safety, and I hope you get your story vetted, verified, and published as quickly as you possibly can.

Someone with his level of education and as voluminously well read as one must be to hold such degrees and positions would never make such an error or typo.

I'll play devil's advocate here and say that no matter how smart and educated someone is, seemingly stupid mistakes like this still happen. Plus, for all we know, OP may not be a native English speaker. As a non-native anglophone myself, I'm sure I sometimes misuse expressions that way.

Anyway, there are good reasons to be skeptical of this post, but I don't think this is one of them.

An economist from a regional bank he would have no contact with the BoG and they certainly wouldn't meet to discuss a report on Bitcoin, he is misunderstanding the function of the BoG.

Someone working for a regional fed bank would not be issued a directive by the national fed bank (and particularly not the BoG), the presumption of hierarchy here is a common misconception of the federal reserve system. Only regulatory activities are managed by the national fed, everything else a regional bank does is independent (to the extent there are fairly large regional disagreements, SFO fed and Boston fed take entirely different positions on monetary policy for instance). If the national fed wanted research done they would do it at the national bank in DC, they have their own teams for this.

A regional fed bank doesn't have a "governor", it has a president/chief executive. The president/chief executive does not represent the bank at FOMC and wouldn't be reported to by a researcher, their function is to run the bank efficiently.

Economists will generally not do the data work for research themselves, this is one of the ways biases are reduced. You design the model and then pass it on to an RA to execute, this process is blind such that you don't brief the RA to prevent bias contamination from occurring.

Research activities of regional fed economists do not have seasons, they are employed specifically to conduct research all year. There is no point in the year where they would get more or less busy even if they were assigned to regular fed business, they might be cyclic with the FOMC meetings but that's it.

This sentence "simulations of money flows, interest rates, multi currency derivative baskets, risk metrics, and their effects on global macro monetary policy and trade agreements." is just a lot of random buzzwords put together and doesn't actually make sense

This sentence "Even with a mediocre adoption rate and variable growth rate, bitcoin severly disrupts how we model, forecast, and ultimately understand currency interactions to make monetary policy decisions." betrays a misunderstanding of what monetary policy is. Monetary policy is unconcerned with forex.

This sentence "this time frame projects the Fed (via the dollar) to lose its dominant global monetary policy maker status " is based on a conspiracy theory regarding how the federal reserve behave. There is not even a consistent view on monetary policy around the world let alone a dominant agency setting it. If you sat ECB and the Fed governors in a room together for a couple of hours you would come back to find their level of disagreement would have resulted in them murdering each other.

Even if the remainder were true the claim that they where interrogated for three days by the BoG is easy to prove to be false. The calendar marks when they actually meet and they have not met for more then two consecutive days so far this year. This claim betrays another misunderstanding of the BoG in that they do not work for the Fed full time but rather simply meet a few times a month to hear from full time employees and make policy decisions, in July they met a total of 6 times.

An employee of a federal reserve branch would not simply be moved to another branch, they are not employees of the system but of the branch itself. Even if he meant branch office within the same region they all tend to be about the same size.

His educational history is extremely suspect. Even if you had a focus on econometrics for your PhD program your PhD would be in economics, there is no such thing as an econometrics PhD. Economics is a strong single-track field, while admissions do happen for people who didn't study undergraduate economics its fairly rare and a computing science major would not provide the quantitative background required for an economics PhD. Economics PhD programs do not follow the standard BA>MA>PhD model as the sequence of study & research doesn't work well; most universities do blended programs where you enter the economics PhD program and happen to get an MA/MS during the course of completing your doctorate.

He claims to have developed a projection model but also a simulation model, its not possible to do this as they require very different data basis, Bitcoin lacks sufficient data to do either. Even if he had written such a study its conclusions would have no weight as it would have an extreme margin of error. Studies like this are sometimes undertaken, they are useful for understanding the interaction between different variables, but they exist for discussion purposes rather then what its conclusions represent (IE I have a model that predisposes that everyone in the US suddenly develops HIV, its a useful discussion piece for understanding how extreme demand increases would impact healthcare delivery and thus where supply inelasticities exist)

Economists don't make predictions, ever. No economic study would even contain high confidence dates.

There are a considerable number of models that do look like weather models that grad students have been tasked to slave away on for years to get their PHDs. If you are not an economist you are unlikely to encounter them.

Actually, the Fed has a large macro model that is essentially the sort of thing you're talking about, and they use it to make projections to help with their monetary policy decisions. It's called FRB/US and the code is available online for free somewhere. That being said, economic models are about as reliable as weather models are. Complex systems are complex.

NDA's are usually for the research. Given he wants to quit (he's already been moved closest to inactive status) I don't think talking about non-NDA stuff could get him in more trouble. He might even get job offers.

Only the 2021 part was really peculiar. It would be a research conclusion, which should be NDA'ed. Maybe it just isn't enough to get him into trouble?

With potentially all due respect, I don't believe you. You wouldn't take an assigned Bitcoin project casually if you were already so interested in the topic. If you're motivated by research you would have jumped on the opportunity to shine.

Secondly, posting this information publicly, if true, could land you in serious hot water, and potentially discredit your reputation permanently.

Lastly, your conclusion deviates sharply from the story. You conclude using general terms like 'central banks', 'governments' and end on a macro-scope while the rest of your story focuses on one assignment.

The great thing about research is that others should be able to independently verify it. Thus, there should be nothing stopping you from going to a different research outfit, using essentially the "same" models and publishing the "same" result. Unless I'm mistaken, the government can't classify math.

Second... What would your superiors say if we were to ask them about this whole incident? Did they question the veracity of your findings, or were they just upset about their implications?

Could you explain how you were able to conclude 2021-2026 were the tipping points? Bitcoin adoption/price increases have not occurred in a steady or predictable manner. Moreover, Bitcoin could grow more in some countries (and steal value from some currencies) well before others. It just seems to me that picking a date "when the revolution occurs" is damn near impossible.

I don't think he claimed to forecast pricing, just growth rate trajectory. We could conjecture anything, but without more information we have no clue what the actual study was. In one of his posts he even talked about how modeling is a very input dependent. My guess is that with his operations research background is that he was probably given a set of assumptions, reworked those into inputs, and then came up with the model and results.

Having read lots of papers on alternative reserve currencies and the development of currencies in BRIC nations, saying all of his work is 100% bullshit without knowing anything tangible is stupid. Do you really disagree?

Pure and simple. 100%. That's not Fedspeak, and anybody who models for the Fed wouldn't be shocked by a finger in the air analysis that you pulled out of your ass. You cannot predict the adoption rate of something as radical as bitcoin as you can with other technologies. And no self-respecting Fed employee would claim to be able to do so.

If you lost the job already why would you care? The community and the press can protect you.

Sorry, no one will buy this without proof. Even if keeping your ID a secret is a must, there are a dozen ways you could verify it to a trusted third party and ask them to protect the source. Why not email a photo of yourself, drivers license and paystub/ termination letter to a reporter who can vouch for you?

Ping me at 2bitidiot@gmail.com, I broke the Gox story and still no one knows who leaked the document to me. Happy to chat.

I, too, find this hard to believe on several different levels.

Mostly though, the punchline simply simply isn't surprising - if you model out anything to grow at the rate that bitcoin has, then it's going to take over the world. Bigger issue is whether regulators and governments can cripple the infrastructure providers before that happens. And they can, with little to no effort. See: BitLicense.

Even with a mediocre adoption rate and variable growth rate, bitcoin severly disrupts how we model, forecast, and ultimately understand currency interactions to make monetary policy decisions.

[Emphasis added]. This implies that the job of the federal reserve, and indeed most of modern macroeconomic planning, becomes severely disrupted even in the mediocre adoption case, to say nothing of the S-curve adoption that we all drool over in r/bitcoin.

Of course, this claim is the product of a mathematical model that needs to be vetted/verified etc before it's to be trusted. But this is still a fairly important claim.

Why were you moved to a tiny regional fed branch after the report? I mean first they almost fired you for not taking the research seriously enough and after you came up with a disrupting result you were exiled sort of? I don't get it.

The information provided on the person's identity is enough to figure out exactly who it is if somebody from his/her Fed branch bothered to spend 60 seconds to look into it. Posting this would be a career ruining move.

The ending of the story, essentially "the results were so amazing, they had to ship us off to the middle of nowhere"... I mean, come on.

I developed a method of evaluating the bitcoin network based on looking at the transaction distribution and hash rate. I ended up with a fairly succinct model that is very similar to a Cobb-Douglas production function but with some twists:

marginal utility is measured in hashes/BTC

a complexity/structural term in the form of the Lambert W function of the transaction distribution scale parameter

specific utility (location parameter of the transaction distribution)

and the transaction distribution entropy

I found that the transaction out distribution is approximated very well by a log-normal distribution over the last 3-years. All data used in the analysis was taken from the blockchain.

Having a background in academic research (not economics) I can tell you one thing. You say that you submitted your first report at the end of June. You then redid everything that supposedly took you 1-2 months of the summer, much better in 2 weeks and came to these DRASTIC conclusions. (First report from May 29 to end of June. Your team was fired 3 weeks after your report. We are at the beginning of august, so you got at most 2-3 weeks for your dramatic report and this includes the tedious formatting to type up a 50+ page report and make it understandable)

Research is much slower, it takes years to do something meaningful. I don't believe one moment that it took you a month (less actually) to 'prove' what you just said. There's more to modeling than applying something and stating a result, especially in the case of something that is supposedly revolutionary and completely new. If it took people one month to do the ground breaking research and modeling as you did, we'd be ethereal bodies that have evolved past our bodily needs.

Edit: To add to this, a peer reviewed paper takes at least 1 month to get reviewed before being accepted in a journal. We're to believe this was reviewed by the board of governors in a matter of days (before promptly firing you).

That assumes that political decisions and battles can overwhelm popular practical behavior. You could come up with a wonder drug tomorrow that magically relieves everyone's aches and pains, makes sex better, increases lifespan by 5 years, and then ... even if half the countries on the planet banned it tomorrow?

By 2021, it'll be in sodas anyway. I mean, imagine if Charlemagne tried to ban constitutions, rather than writing his own, or if Henry Ford tried to lobby Congress to make conveyor belts illegal?

Point is, cryptocurrencies are super-money. They are "just plain better" tools that humanity has developed, and even if they experience strong political impedence, it's exceedingly likely that they'll take over.

Even if /u/real_federales simulations are inaccurate or off by a decade? or even a century? So what?

Inconsistence. If the government was really afraid of Bitcoin, they would instead use your research and its conclusion (big disruption, etc) to show people why it is dangerous and "must be stopped". They would not hide research that proves their points.

You claim a tipping point exactly between the years 2021 and 2026? Lol. Nobody ever predicts a major disruption from a new technology as happening exactly 7-12 years from now. We usually see 5-10 years. Or 10-20 years. Round numbers, you know.

Its kind of a mix. There are private members of it and it is held separate from the government(which has its advantages in that it means politics doesn't strictly drive monetary policy) but the board of governors are chosen by the president and senate and almost all profits go to the government(96% in 2010).

The US government is in fact NOT afraid, but rather supportive of Bitcoin. See..

The US Gov is not a single actor with a single opinion. For example, one branch of the government is funding TOR development and sescurity, whilst another is simultaneously trying to break it. Different branches have different goals, different incentives, and are made of of people with wildly different ideologies.

If the government was really afraid of Bitcoin, they would instead use your research and its conclusion (big disruption, etc) to show people why it is dangerous and "must be stopped". They would not hide research that proves their points.

Uh.. I don't see this happening at all. It's not hard to imagine that there are some in government who are afraid of losing power, regardless of how beneficial that would be for society. The middle man isn't likely to show the world how much better they could be without him.

Can you explain more about the Board's reaction? Were they totally convinced by your research and assured of the robustness of your model or did they think you were some starry-eyed techno-utopian who was out of his depth?

It seems like they would want you to do dive even deeper into your research/modeling if they thought there was a real danger. Are they taking the ostrich approach?

You didnt bother to make copies of these results and the work youve been doing? Im sure someone as smart as you would have predicted at least getting fired or ridiculed for your work. You could have had the leverage to release these findings to the public. So, any chance you can recreate your research and publish it?

I'd rather be back on Wall Street. While infinitely less transparent the available research resources are boundless if you can deliver valuable analysis. I enjoyed my time at the Fed, even with the money being relatively poor, but this was the last straw.

I am not tasked with making policy recommendations, just analysis of the outcomes of current policies and future policies under certain circumstances so I do not sit in those meetings. My guess is they will try to actively restrict and restrain bitcoin until the inevitable happens.

Good post. If you are being genuine, it's very interesting insight...but it's not what I'd consider surprising, in any way. The establishment SHOULD be frightened of the impact that digital currency will have. It makes them obsolete.

I will PM you a message so you don't forget about the comment or thread later on. Just use the RemindMe! command and optional date formats. Subsequent confirmations in this unique thread will be sent through PM to avoid spam. Default wait is a day.

Can we submit a FOIA to see any part of your findings? Bitcoin data is all publicly available, and while I'm sure they would be allowed to keep details of the model secret, surely they wouldn't be able to stop a FOIA request in its entirety.

Yes which accounted for the variance in the aforementioned time window. I don't want to get into the confidence intervals, but in short the time window is statistically significant based upon all of our assumptions (inputs) but obviously those can change. All we can do is take our best data analysis and feed them into our simulations to come up with a forecast.

One does not just determine technological adeptness of populations a decade away with simulations. These are classic chaotic systems. The real date will be determined by collective movements of whales, including perhaps some of your former employees.

This is a huge technological, monetary, and policy disruption which leaves the Fed, the US govt, and other entities with much less control. Our best case scenarios are modeled upon current bitcoin adoption rates which have simulated a tipping point for the year 2026 (worst case 2021); this time frame projects the Fed (via the dollar) to lose its dominant global monetary policy maker status - instead everything will superceded by bitcoin.

I laughed, very hard :)

PS: This is something I knew for a long time

I can´t wait for the faces of my peers to drop there jaws and begging for coins when this happens :)

Unbelievable that this post is top of this subreddit right now. Seriously, this is scammy BS.

Somebody with that level of education/experience isn't going to throw it away with a post on reddit that may violate a nondisclosure provision of his employment contract (his career will be ruined even if he intends to leave the FED).

This post hits so many "truths" of this subreddit, it is an obvious troll.

'le system' is also a pretty general term for the government as a whole so it could be a coincidence.

also even if it was called something more idiosyncratic like 'the Fedstem' or something and OP casually called it that, it still wouldn't be proof like me saying "can't respond now i'm on the job" wouldn't prove i'm a cop

It's just at the Federal Reserve, "in the system" and "out of the system" are phrases people use all the time. It fits into OP's post seamlessly.

I think OP works for the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. The only major branch for that Federal Reserve Bank is the Miami branch. Last time I checked, the Miami branch has no economist. So I really don't know where OP works...

I have kept things broad and used some misdirection on purpose. The amount of people with similar pedigree producing similar reports is non trivial. I also have very good experience with NDAs having worked in the trading industry.

I'm a trained economist with a B.S. in Computer Science, a M.S. in Operations Research, and a PhD in Econometrics. I interned at the NY Fed during my degree, worked at a macro trading hedge fund, and now work at the major S.E. Fed branch doing econometrics and related modeling. I've had a long running interest in bitcoin and was one of the first people to publish a working paper on FPGA based bitcoin miners at a Georgia university focused on technology. I know bitcoin, technology, and economics on a theoretical and applied level. I'm not motivated by money (see my move from hedge fund to fed); I'm an applied academic with an incessant drive for research.

Not saying you're wrong or that I don't believe you, but you did paint a pretty good picture of your background. While there are probably a lot of people doing this research, if it comes out that someone leaked this, they will use this info to figure out who you are. Regardless of whether you violated an NDA, they will make things hell.

I'm a trained economist with a B.S. in Computer Science, a M.S. in Operations Research, and a PhD in Econometrics. I interned at the NY Fed during my degree, worked at a macro trading hedge fund, and now work at the major S.E. Fed branch doing econometrics and related modeling.

Given your track records, it is highly unlikely you will end up at a branch of a Federal Reserve Bank and not at the Board of Governors.

The Board was highly alarmed and interrogated me and my fellow researchers in a 3 day session.

So, even though you took interest in bitcoin early on before you worked for the fed, you didn't fully apply yourself in a study by the fed on bitcoin. Lie #1

You want to create an image of the fed as a group of peopel who fear bitcoin, so you say you actually were reprimanded by representatives of the fed for your lack of effort. Lie #2

Now, motivated by being yelled at instead of your apparent passion for bitcoin, you created a new model that makes bitcoin look really really "disruptive." You literally use the word disruptive, a word commonly used to market bitcoins and the bitcoin community. Lie #3

Having reviewed your new research, the fed is shocked. It's fears have been validated by your mystery wondermodel, and instead of pursuing further research, you are promptly trasnfered to a lower position for no reason, except the x-files kind of reason which is meant to create interest for bitcoin in the minds of some. Lie# 4

There's numerous other false implications. Chief of them is that bitcoin is somehow key to creating a sustainable future - what is this, whole foods? Why are you even bringing up sustainability. If they fear something, likely they will do more research. Another thing that is strange is that you use the word disruptive when it suits you, and you use the word sustainable when it suits, two meaningless buzzwords designed to take money from one person's wallet and into another's, meaning this is a marketing ploy, yet you are trying to convince us that you are a scientific numbers guy. Where are the numbers?

Can I see some evidence of this statement: "Bitcoin has fundamentally changed the spectrum of how we view and model economics."

Who is we? What was the old spectrum and what's the new one? Are you sure you know what the word spectrum means?

My research shows by 2021 bitcoiners will totally be flying while everyone else looks at us like we were zod from superman. The fear of flying bitcoiners will lead to the banning of all flying objects including planes so society can concentrate on catching the nakamotos in the sky ...

I guess the underlying question is, was the veracity of your findings questioned by your superiors? Or were they just upset about the implications, in which case your re-assignment is just a petty act of retribution on their part?

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